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| Source:Thom Hartmann with a look at United Kingdom Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher (Conservative, England) & United President Ronald Reagan (Republican, California) |
“Thom Hartmann takes a look back at the political careers of British Prime minister Margaret Thatcher and U.S. President Ronald Reagan.”
From Thom Hartmann
I agree with Thom Hartmann (for perhaps the 1st and last time this year about anything) about the debt and deficits that then Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and her Conservative Government piled up in Britain in the 1980s. Not that different from the debt and deficits that President Ronald Reagan piled up in the 1980s, or President George W. Bush pilled up in the 2000s.
I’m also not here to make Margaret Thatcher look like a Goddess or Saint. (And I could make a joke about that, but I’ll spare you and her) I’m just going to talk about the situation that she inherited in 1979 when she became Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and the country she left when she left office in 1990.
In 1979, Britain was not just a socialist state, (yes, a democratic socialist state) but a socialist state that was drowning in its own socialism. They had ridiculous rates on deficits, debt, inflation, interest rates, high unemployment, and poverty. The beautiful, thriving, Britain that we saw (at least when the sun was out) in the 1990s and 2000s, is not the Britain that we saw in 1979, the early 1980s, or even mid 1980s.
Remember, Labour Party Leader Tony Blair didn’t run for Prime Minister in 1997, to return Britain to socialism, with state-run banks, energy companies, airlines, etc, where people who were unemployed or on Welfare, never had to go back to, or even go to work. He just presented a center-left alternative to Maggie Thatcher’s individualistic conservatism. Remember the New Labour in Britain in the late 1990s and 2000s. This wasn’t a socialist movement at all.
For Britain to get moving again or no longer be a declining power, but again a western power can be respected in the world again and not just by Europe and America, but the rest of the developed world, she had to get the economy moving again. And that meant a lot more Britons working and earning their own living and a lot more economic privatization in the economy. And that meant a lot of short and long-term pain for millions of Britons. But her economic strategy was successful
